Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (86 page)

The next morning I did not go to the wards, but stood at the gate leading from the courtyard to the road outside. Two young men in striped ponchos lifted the girl’s body wrapped in a straw mat onto the back of a wooden cart. A donkey waited. I had been drawn to this place as one is drawn, inexplicably, to certain scenes of desolation — executions, battlefields. All at once, the woman looked up and saw me. She had taken off her hat. The heavy-hanging coil of her hair made her head seem larger, darker, noble. I pressed some money into her hand.

“For flowers,” I said. “A priest.” Her cheeks shook as though minutes ago a stone had been dropped into her navel and the ripples were just now reaching her head. I regretted having come to that place.

“Sí, sí,”
the woman said. Her own face was stitched with flies. “The doctor is one of the angels. He has finished the work of God. My daughter is beautiful.”

What could she mean! The lip had not been fixed. The girl had died before he would have done it.

“Only a fine line that God will erase in time,” she said.

I reached into the cart and lifted a corner of the mat in which the girl had been rolled. Where the cleft had been there was now a fresh line of tiny sutures. The Cupid’s bow was delicately shaped, the vermilion border aligned. The flattened nostril had now the same rounded shape as the other one. I let the mat fall over the face of the dead girl, but not before I had seen the touching place where the finest black hairs sprang from the temple.

“Adiós, adiós…”
And the cart creaked away to the sound of hooves, a tinkling bell.

There are events in a doctor’s life that seem to mark the boundary between youth and age, seeing and perceiving. Like certain dreams, they illuminate a whole lifetime of past behavior. After such an event, a doctor is not the same as he was before. It had seemed to me then to have been the act of someone demented, or at least insanely arrogant. An attempt to reorder events. Her death had come to him out of order. It should have come after the lip had been repaired, not before. He could have told the mother that, no, the lip had not been fixed. But he did not. He said nothing. It had been an act of omission, one of those strange lapses to which all of us are subject and which we live to regret. It must have been then, at that moment, that the knowledge of what he would do appeared to him. The words of the mother had not consoled him; they had hunted him down. He had not done it for her. The dire necessity was his. He would not accept that Imelda had died before he could repair her lip. People who do such things break free from society. They follow their own lonely path. They have a secret which they can never reveal. I must never let on that I knew.

How often I have imagined it. Ten o’clock at night. The hospital of Comayagua is all but dark. Here and there lanterns tilt and skitter up and down the corridors. One of these lamps breaks free from the others and descends the stone steps to the underground room that is the morgue of the hospital. This room wears the expression as if it had waited all night for someone to come. No silence so deep as this place with its cargo of newly dead. Only the slow drip of water over stone. The door closes gassily and clicks shut. The lock is turned. There are four tables, each with a body encased in a paper shroud. There is no mistaking her. She is the smallest. The surgeon takes a knife from his pocket and slits open the paper shroud, that part in which the girl’s head is enclosed. The wound seems to be living on long after she has died. Waves of heat emanate from it, blurring his vision. All at once, he turns to peer over his shoulder. He sees nothing, only a wooden crucifix on the wall.

He removes a package of instruments from a satchel and arranges them on a tray. Scalpel, scissors, forceps, needle holder. Sutures and gauze sponges are produced. Stealthy, hunched, engaged, he begins. The dots of blue dye are still there upon her mouth. He raises the scalpel, pauses. A second glance into the darkness. From the wall a small lizard watches and accepts. The first cut is made. A sluggish flow of dark blood appears. He wipes it away with a sponge. No new blood comes to take its place. Again and again he cuts, connecting each of the blue dots until the whole of the zigzag slice is made, first on one side of the cleft, then on the other. Now the edges of the cleft are lined with fresh tissue. He sets down the scalpel and takes up scissors and forceps, undermining the little flaps until each triangle is attached only at one side. He rotates each flap into its new position. He must be certain that they can be swung with out tension. They can. He is ready to suture. He fits the tiny curved needle into the jaws of the needle holder. Each suture is placed precisely the same number of millimeters from the cut edge, and the same distance apart. He ties each knot down until the edges are apposed. Not too tightly. These are the most meticulous sutures of his life. He cuts each thread close to the knot. It goes well. The vermilion border with its white skin roll is exactly aligned. One more stitch and the Cupid’s bow appears as if by magic. The man’s face shines with moisture. Now the nostril is incised around the margin, released, and sutured into a round shape to match its mate. He wipes the blood from the face of the girl with gauze that he has dipped in water. Crumbs of light are scattered on the girl’s face. The shroud is folded once more about her. The instruments are handed into the satchel. In a moment the morgue is dark and a lone lantern ascends the stairs and is extinguished.

Six weeks later I was in the darkened amphitheater of the Medical School. Tiers of seats rose in a semicircle above the small stage where Hugh Franciscus stood presenting the case material he had encountered in Honduras. It was the highlight of the year. The hall was filled. The night before he had arranged the slides in the order in which they were to be shown. I was at the controls of the slide projector.

“Next slide!” he would order from time to time in that military voice which had called forth blind obedience from generations of medical students, interns, residents and patients.

“This is a fifty-seven-year-old man with a severe burn contracture of the neck. You will notice the rigid webbing that has fused the chin to the presternal tissues. No motion of the head on the torso is possible…. Next slide!”

“Click,” went the projector.

“Here he is after the excision of the scar tissue and with the head in full extension for the first time. The defect was then covered…. Next slide!”

“Click.”

“…with full-thickness drums of skin taken from the abdomen with the Padgett dermatome. Next slide!”

“Click.”

And suddenly there she was, extracted from the shadows, suspended above and beyond all of us like a resurrection. There was the oval face, the long black hair unbraided, the tiny gold hoops in her ears. And that luminous gnawed mouth. The whole of her life seemed to have been summed up in this photograph. A long silence followed that was the surgeon’s alone to break. Almost at once, like the anesthetist in the operating room in Comayagua, I knew that something was wrong. It was not that the man would not speak as that he could not. The audience of doctors, nurses and students seemed to have been infected by the black, limitless silence. My own pulse doubled. It was hard to breathe. Why did he not call out for the next slide? Why did he not save himself? Why had he not removed this slide from the ones to be shown? All at once I knew that he had used his camera on her again. I could see the long black shadows of her hair flowing into the darker shadows of the morgue. The sudden blinding flash…The next slide would be the one taken in the morgue. He would be exposed.

In the dim light reflected from the slide, I saw him gazing up at her, seeing not the colored photograph, I thought, but the negative of it where the ghost of the girl was. For me, the amphitheater had become Honduras. I saw again that courtyard littered with patients. I could see the dust in the beam of light from the projector. It was then that I knew that she was his measure of perfection and pain — the one lost, the other gained. He, too, had heard the click of the camera, had seen her wince and felt his mercy enlarge. At last he spoke.

“Imelda.” It was the one word he had heard her say. At the sound of his voice I removed the next slide from the projector. “Click”…and she was gone. “Click” again, and in her place the man with the orbital cancer. For a long moment Franciscus looked up in my direction, on his face an expression that I have given up trying to interpret. Gratitude? Sorrow? It made me think of the gaze of the girl when at last she understood that she must hand over to him the evidence of her body.

“This is a sixty-two-year-old man with a basal cell carcinoma of the temple eroding into the bony orbit…” he began as though nothing had happened.

At the end of the hour, even before the lights went on, there was loud applause. I hurried to find him among the departing crowd. I could not. Some weeks went by before I caught sight of him. He seemed vaguely convalescent, as though a fever had taken its toll before burning out.

Hugh Franciscus continued to teach for fifteen years, although he operated a good deal less, then gave it up entirely. It was as though he had grown tired of blood, of always having to be involved with blood, of having to draw it, spill it, wipe it away, stanch it. He was a quieter, softer man, I heard, the ferocity diminished. There were no more expeditions to Honduras or anywhere else.

I, too, have not been entirely free of her. Now and then, in the years that have passed, I see that donkey-cart cortège, or his face bent over hers in the morgue. I would like to have told him what I now know, that his unrealistic act was one of goodness, one of those small, persevering acts done, perhaps, to ward off madness. Like lighting a lamp, boiling water for tea, washing a shirt. But, of course, it’s too late now.

Sue William Silverman

 

SUE WILLIAM SILVERMAN’
s first memoir,
Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You
, won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs award series in creative nonfiction.
Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey Through Sexual Addiction
is her second memoir. Her poetry collection is
Hieroglyphics in Neon
. Her essays have won literary competitions sponsored by
Hotel Amerika
,
Mid-American Review
, and
Water˜Stone Journal
. Other work has appeared in such places as
Prairie Schooner
,
Chicago Tribune
,
Detroit Free Press
,
Redbook
,
Chronicle of Higher Education
, and
The Writer’s Chronicle
. She’s associate editor of
Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction
, and she teaches in the low-residency MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College.

 

Skimming the
Holland Sentinel
, a local newspaper in west Michigan, I see a man who has haunted me for years. Pat Boone. Once again I gaze at him in alluring black and white, just like the photograph I treasured in ninth grade. According to the article, he will be performing the first Saturday night in May at the Calvary Reformed Church as part of Tulip Time Festival. I order a ticket immediately.

On the night of the concert, Pat Boone dazzles onto the stage in white bucks, tight white pants, a white jacket emblazoned with red and blue sequined stars across the shoulders. Though he began as a ’50s and ’60s pop singer, he has aged into a Christian music icon favored by — I’m sure — Republicans. That I am a Jewish atheist liberal Democrat gives me no pause, not even as he performs in this concrete megachurch weighted with massive crosses. In fact, growing up, these very symbols gave me comfort.

I sit in the balcony, seats empty in the side sections. It’s hardly a sold-out crowd. While we enthusiastically clap after the opening number, there are no whistles or shrieks from this mostly elderly, sedate audience. There is no dancing in the aisles, no rushing the stage. If a fan swoons from her upholstered pew, it will more likely be from stroke than idolatry. The cool, unscented air in the auditorium feels polite as a Sunday worship service — rather than a Saturday-night-rock-and-roll-swaggering-Mick-Jagger kind of concert.

Yet I am certainly worshipful. Of him. I am transfixed. It’s as if his photograph — that paper image — is conjured to life. Through binoculars, breathless, I watch only him, me in my own white jacket, as if I knew we’d match.

I’m not surprised he still affects me. In fact, during the days leading up to tonight, I plotted how I might meet him after the concert, for I must finally tell him what I failed to say last time we met. But in case security guards stop me, I’ve written a letter that explains the role he played in my life. At the very least I’ll ask a guard to hand-deliver my letter. To further prove my loyalty, I’ve retrieved, from an old scrapbook, my “i am a member of the pat boone fan club” card, printed on blue stock, which I’ve put in my pocket. But regardless of the letter or fan-club card, I’m determined to get close enough to touch him, the way I once touched that other photograph, years ago. Time collapses as if, even now, it’s not too late for him to save me from my Jewish family, save me from a childhood long ended.